Removing old legacy/unused data from network drives

[Davida1992]

We have always had issues with multiple folders being created on our shared areas... People leave, or circumstances change but the data gets left unused, dormant forever just taking up space!!

 

What methods do you use to ensure that data on your network drives are being cleaned up and that old data is being removed? How do you teach your users to remove data that is not being used? Space has always been a concern for us and we are going to be restructuring our drives and storage soon so ideally it would be nice for departments to clean up their crap!

 

Does anyone have any ideas of the best way of going about doing this? What do you do?

[mrbios]

Archive data that hasn't been used in a long time based on the last accessed date. Depends on the OS your file server is running but check this: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate if it's set to 0 then you'll have to set it to 1 and wait a few years if it's already set to 1, you're good to go.

 

This will probably do what you want: https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Search-Files-By-Last-65c87f8e

[subway_lunch]

At the end of each year, I create a csv file of all disabled user accounts both staff and students. The via a powershell script I have, I use the csv in to parse the usernames into a robocopy command, to move all folders from the staff and student home drives. To a separate files storage system, which is normally kept in a offline state during the rest of the year. This normally cleans up about 500 to 600Gb's worth of data.